Where Did It All Go Right? Read Free

something of Nan Mabel in that.
    12 . Simon and Lesley’s: Charmaine and Natasha. Melissa and Graham’s: Ben, Jack and William. Not a bad apple among them, yet.

preface
    Down the Welfare
    We have nothing to lose but our aitches
.
    George Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937)
    I can still taste welfare orange. It has to be at least 33 years since I last drank any, but there it is, in some intuitive corner of my memory. I must have tasted a hundred different kinds of orange juice in my lifetime, and yet I can evoke the powerful intensity of welfare orange as if it were only yesterday.
    Contrary to the name, welfare orange wasn’t actually free, but it was state-subsidised in order to ensure that young mothers could afford a fix of vitamin C for their children. My mum used to walk ‘down the welfare’ every Monday with Auntie Sue 1 to pick up orange for me and powdered milk for Simon, then my baby brother. The pair of them would just have enough housekeeping to buy a small, medicine-sized bottle of orange each, although the drink was sufficiently concentrated to last a week when diluted. When we moved house in 1968, from Duston to Abington Vale – on the developing side of Northampton – Mum stopped getting it (the new house in Winsford Way was no longer within pram-pushing distance of the local welfare centre). I missed the vivid, sticky stuff.
    Welfare orange is pivotal to my memory of childhood in two ways. First, the very thought of it gives me a Proustian rush. I love those. Secondly, the fact that it was tantamount to a state benefit paints a picture of something I hadn’t really given much thought to: the hand-to-mouth financial circumstance of my parents in the early years of their marriage, which certainly makes me feel more vital and real as I sit here in the pampered environs of my adult life. I generally consider myself the product of a middle-class upbringing – things certainly looked that way when I finally left home in 1984 – but you see I was really a child of family allowance, a distant benefactor of Beveridge. Simon and I were suckled on welfare milk, our teeth set on the road to ruin by welfare orange (with a superfluous spoonful of sugar in it, I’m told). We had it hard, we lived on the breadline, we couldn’t even afford full-price squash.
    Except, of course, life wasn’t so bad. In fact it wasn’t bad at all. There was little social stigma attached to being ‘on welfare’ in Duston, because everybody was. We had an indoor toilet, a Ford Anglia and a garage to put it in. There’s cine film of me chasing Pap Collins with a water pistol into the garage at Duston, and it doesn’t look much like
Angela’s Ashes
. (Well, somebody had a cine camera, for a start.) And because my dad worked for an insurance company he was eligible for a competitive mortgage, which is how come we moved when I was about three to the new house – as in newly built – in a new suburb. Not quite
Brideshead Revisited
, I know, but we hardly lived in a box.
    This is why I have often wondered about my upbringing over the years. Was it too comfortable? By which I mean was it too comfortable ever to make a decent book? Who boasts of attending the School of No Knocks? My mum’s own modest working-class childhood was far away from the breadline (indeed, the family on her father’s side were considered ‘upper crust’ round Northampton’s no-nonsense Jimmy’s End because their income came from an
office
job within London Midland and Scottish Railway), and yet she loves reading about those who had it hard: Catherine Cookson and the like. It is a vicarious pleasure, just like watching the super-rich suffer on
Dynasty
or
Dallas
used to be, superceded these days by criticising the wallpaper of some Spanish princess in
Hello!
or footballers’ wives in
OK!
magazine. If for convenience we categorise the middle classes at the time of my childhood as the semidetached, then my parents were middle class, but that’s an